“Were you lying when you said you loved me?”

“Of course not!”

It was happening. It had already started happening, even before Maria dialed Lily’s number.

All night long, Maria had been building up a wall inside her.

She’d been going over all the reasons this was a bad idea. Telling herself she wouldn’t do it. She couldn’t. It went against her very nature.

That wall was breaking into pieces now.

It didn’t matter what Maria tried to tell herself. Lily was right.

Maria knew how this worked. What the board had said. She knew what she had to do.

The world had rules, but those rules weren’t made for people like Maria and Lily.

“Then go out there and do it,” Lily was saying. “Tell her you’ve got some of my pain meds, then bring her back to the bathroom to take it. You can pretend to have some too. She won’t know the difference. When she’s high all she can see are the damn stars.”

“She’ll know I didn’t really do it.” Maria wasn’t sure if she was arguing with Lily or herself. “If she tests positive and I don’t, she’ll know—”

“So what? What’s she going to do about it?”

Maria shrugged into the phone.

She didn’t really care. The details didn’t matter. It would still be the worst thing Maria had ever done.

On the other end of the phone, Lily was silent. Maria couldn’t even hear her breathe.

When she finally spoke, her voice was so low Maria had to strain to hear her.

“Do I need to remind you what Delilah did to me?” Lily whispered. “How badly she screwed me up? How she made me feel ugly and worthless and perverted? How miserable I was after that until you came along?”

Maria swallowed. Her phone buzzed with a text, the way it had been doing all night. She hit the Dismiss button and swallowed again.

“She’s a waste of space,” Lily said. “She doesn’t deserve your pity.”

Maria had never physically hurt anyone in her life. She’d always figured it would only make things worse in a world that already sucked most of the time. Sometimes, though, when she thought about what Delilah had done to Lily, she got obsessed with the idea of how good it would feel to punch her in the face.

Delilah hadn’t earned what she had. She’d won class president because she cheated. She’d gotten captain because she’d slept with the coach. She didn’t study as hard as Maria, but somehow she always got perfect grades anyway.

She was probably sleeping with all the teachers. The men and the women both.

Delilah wouldn’t be in first place on that stupid list if it hadn’t been for all those things. Maria had worked. She’d earned everything she had.